Catacombs of Terror! (2 page)

By now our bottle of wine was empty, but Blimfield's story had intrigued me. I opened another bottle and we began to discuss a price. To be fair, I had no real reason to buy the manuscript, but now I felt that I simply had to read it, and at the time—oh, those balmy days at the start of the century—I was comparatively well off. Of which more shortly. As far as I understood the story, there had been a thousand copies of the first draft of
Catacombs
published, some of which had been sold, some of which had been lost. There was no electronic copy of the text, the computers belonging to Hedonist Press having long been consigned to landfill. The only extant copy of the manuscript—an edited, corrected version—lay on the desk between us.

That hot afternoon drew on, and Blimfield enthused about his milk float and about the dire need, as he saw it, for genuinely local daily newspapers, and about the ability of his business partner to write these newspapers with very little knowledge of local matters. This new acquaintance, it appeared, was also willing to be paid in cider. I kept my considerable reservations about all of this to myself, and, as the second bottle was finished, we agreed on a price; I paid Blimfield, and, as it happened, that was the last I saw of him. I wished him well with his milk float, his nascent newspaper empire, and thought little of the matter for the next decade. The manuscript, all but forgotten, languished in my desk drawer—until 2014.

• • •

The foregoing is by way of a preamble, some background to explain how you, the reader, happens to be reading
Catacombs of Terror!
As I say, in 2003 I was the proprietor of a small antiquarian bookshop in Bath—and that was the trade I plied for some years after. I put the manuscript away for safe-keeping, and concentrated on my shop, on buying and selling, on book fairs, rumours of rare first editions, on calfskin bindings, disputed titles verso, on ‘slight foxing' and ‘signs of wear.' But to my dismay, the real world, as it likes to be known, came knocking. Publishing houses such as Wordsworth began to print cheap editions of the classics—and thus I lost the casual trade of the students looking for serviceable copies of Shakespeare, Dickens, Thackeray, and the like. Then the Internet began to take chunks from my market—who would browse my dusty shop when they could type in a title on their personal computer and buy the edition they chose from a host of sellers worldwide at the click of a mouse?

The shops that neighboured mine closed one by one, replaced by estate agents and outlets offering overpriced coffee, with ‘boutique pop-ups' which appeared to sell nothing very much at all. It was a slow process, almost imperceptible, but my shop became untenable. My lifestyle—late rising, a glass of wine or two at lunch, amiable conversations with fellow bibliophiles—became untenable. With great regret, I closed my shop, and announced to my landlord that I would not be renewing my lease.

Whilst engaged in the desultory process of clearing out my shop I came across the—almost forgotten—manuscript that I had bought from the publisher Ambrose Blimfield a full decade previously. The whole tale came, unbidden, back to me. And I thought to myself—perhaps now is the time to ‘cash in' on my investment?

One does not run an antiquarian bookshop for twenty-five years or more without making friends, and recently I had been spending some time with a very good friend who shared much of my dismay at the way that things had changed, the way things were not as they used to be, particularly in the world of books.

The publishing house of Scratter & Pomace was founded in 1888 by Alfred Scratter and Juan Pomace, and for many years was highly regarded in the book trade. Notably, the now classic
A Pedlar's Tale
by Devlin Crease was published by that house to great acclaim at the turn of the century, and their deftly chosen list was envied by many. During the second half of the twentieth century they fought hard to avoid being subsumed into the great conglomerates, jackals such as HarperCollins, Penguin Random House, and the like.

In hindsight this may have been something of a tactical error, as it turned out that the very same economic forces that brought low my own little shop had also unhorsed the venerable firm of Scratter & Pomace—cheap reprints of out-of-copyright classics, Amazon's dominance of the market, and so on.

Richard Scratter, the great-grandson of Alfred, was my very good friend. And it was to him that I turned. The glory days of deluxe hardback editions, it was apparent, were in the past. S&P had fallen sufficiently low for them to be competing with the likes of Wordsworth on cheap reprints of
Treasure Island
,
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
, and suchlike. Richard was contemplating the fate of other publishers he knew who had been reduced to printing anthologies of what is apparently termed ‘bottle-creep'—amateur erotica reprinted from Internet sources, where like-minded perverts would share and mutually appreciate appallingly written screeds of sexual fantasies.

Scratter and I discussed the possibility of publishing
Catacombs of Terror!
as a mass-market paperback, and over lunch in a delightful restaurant we made an agreement. He would engage a professional to retype the manuscript, and a highly proficient illustrator to produce cover art, and
Catacombs
would live again.

I thought again of the tale that Ambrose Blimfield had told me—that story of a bet, of a book, of publishing books on hemp paper, of fire, of drunkenness, and I thought—this book
should
live again.

Once Carol, our typist, had transcribed the damaged manuscript, Scratter and myself read it through—and we were fascinated. Somehow the writer had recast the city of Bath—‘a genteel tourist trap,' as it's described in the book—as the setting for an infernal drama played out in the sombre, rain-soaked tones of a horror story. The text is littered with swear words, there is frequent reference to illegal drugs, several lines appear to be lifted verbatim from more famous detective novels, names are stolen from other books, and, notably, from a little-known document called the
Neoist Manifestos
, and a sort of cod-Esperanto is employed as an archaic language, but remarkably, none of this seems to matter.

I looked up Stanley Donwood on the Internet and sent a letter to his agent. Soon enough, a reply arrived stating that Donwood had very little recollection of the book and even less desire to have anything to do with it—in fact, he apparently disowned it, much as he had disowned
Yobs
—and he wished us ‘the best of luck with that cheap trash.'

However, as you will discover in the following pages,
Catacombs of Terror!
is anything but cheap trash. Is it trashy? Well, perhaps. Is it a ‘page-turner'? Undoubtedly. And thrilling? Undeniably. And even if it captures a time now passed—a world of slow modems, of smoking in pubs and cafés, of dictaphones and tape recorders, a world when surveillance was new enough to be remarked upon—the book resonates. The plucky individual, flawed, but still, at root, deeply moral, fighting against a world that shows no mercy, that confounds him at every turn, fighting against the inevitability of defeat, buoyed by the merest hint of love . . . this dark account of a terrible weekend in the beautiful city of Bath compels us to look beyond the facade. It takes us to the underground, behind the curtain, beneath the polite, respectable veil that society would draw across the horrors that lie beneath. It takes us down . . . down to the Catacombs of Terror!

—Sterling Bland, Bath, 2015

Let's see. Friday 10th July, 11:30
A.M
. Not a good time for me, and not a good day either, so far. Not if you were me. The best thing about my situation was that I'd escaped the wind. And the rain. The cold was still with me, but I was forgetting it fast. I'd delegated. A third coffee was dealing with it. The worst thing about my situation you don't want to know. Yeah, well. I didn't know the worst thing about my situation either. Not yet, anyway.

July. The coldest and wettest ever, I thought. Okay. But I thought that every year. Maybe it was getting worse, every year. The sky squatted above the city, snagging on the chimneys and aerials, sagging into the streets like a wet military blanket. I lit my fourth cigarette since escaping the downpour and tried to focus on the newspaper I had propped in front of me. The usual. Imminent terrors, tawdry killings, economic gloom. I wasn't feeling too good.

I put my coffee cup down and stared out at the rain. I had enough available overdraft to pay this month's rent, but apart from that I was looking at a series of humiliating, embarrassing, and finally futile phone calls to my bank manager. Brown envelopes through the door en route to the wastepaper basket. Reminders, ditto. Final demands. Bailiffs. Then what?

I still hadn't been paid for my last job. Or the one before that. My first couple of years as a private investigator had gone okay. Dull, but okay. But this year had been dead. Three cases, all of them very boring. Identify, tail, photograph, deliver prints. And my last two clients had defaulted. Hadn't returned my increasingly frequent phone calls. I'd started considering employing a debt collector. Not my favourite kind of people, having been on the receiving end of their kind more than once. It wasn't a global crisis, I thought, looking briefly at the headlines. But it wasn't any kind of fun. It was enough. And Barry Eliot? He was more than enough. The guy was not necessary.

Well, okay. Maybe the Barry Eliot problem was my fault. Partly my fault. About one third my fault, I reckoned. Half my fault would be pushing it . . . maybe. All right. I'd met Karen Eliot the night before. Again. I had been on my way home after a busy day watching the telephone, fiddling with paper clips, reading a magazine. A quick drink? Sure, why not. A bite to eat? Well, I had nothing much to look forward to in my fridge back at the flat, so, hey, why not. Well, okay. Barry's away. You're lonely. Sure. And then I'd woken up in the morning, Friday 10th July, in her bed. Groggy, hung over, and with the horribly dawning realisation that I'd done it again. I'd spent the night with Karen. Again.

It had been only two weeks since Barry had caught us in bed, one stupid afternoon when he was supposed to be playing golf with some of those high fliers he likes so much. He'd probably suspected something was going on. Karen and me—we really got on well. And I mean it. She hated Barry. She liked me. And maybe more than liked. I felt—well, I felt that we could have had some kind of life together. In another world. Another life. Some other dimension. Anyway. Barry had walked in. It wasn't a good moment, not compared with the moment just before. He threatened to kill me—yawn—and then threatened to have my licence revoked. Okay. Death threats from Barry, with his squeaking voice and appalling taste in golfing slacks I could handle, but losing my licence . . . .

The trouble was that Barry was extremely well connected. I didn't know why, but he was. He knew people in the Council. He knew people in the police force. I mean, the guy played
golf
. He put on those revolting slacks, those sickening pullovers, those laughable shoes—and schmoozed in the nineteenth hole with magistrates, judges, superintendents, and commissioners. He had his gig sewn up. If Barry wanted, Barry usually got. He was, you could be forgiven for thinking, not a guy to cross. And I was screwing his wife. Maybe I was in love with her. I didn't know. I couldn't tell.

You see? That was the worst thing about my situation. As I thought then, as I shouldered my way out of the café and into the weather. Yeah. As I thought then.

It was nearly midday, and if I didn't at least sit behind my desk for a few minutes I couldn't justify lunch. I decided to look up debt collection services in the Yellow Pages. Time to hit the office. Ha. Won't you step through to my office? Step along the alleyway past the dog shit, the puke slicks, the garbage, the never-picked-up bin liners, their contents spewed along the concrete. Come through the peeling, flaking door along the corridor that always, inexplicably, smells of human piss. I'll just unlock the door. Notice the brass plaque on your way in? Not as shiny as maybe it could have been, but still.
VALPOLICELLA INVESTIGATIONS
. Yep, that's me. The boss. Martin Valpolicella. Got a problem? Missing husband? Missing wife? Missing cat? You've come to the right place. Oh, for sure.

I let myself into the office and clicked the light on and picked a piece of paper off the mat. A note, written in block biro letters on good-quality paper. Before I read it, I dropped the note on my desk. I walked over to the cupboard, opened it, grabbed a bottle, and poured myself two fingers of whiskey. I sat down behind my desk and fumbled in my pocket for my cigarettes.

So, it's either good news—like a job, for example. Any other kind of good news was pretty much inconceivable. A job. That would be very good. I needed a job badly, it was true. Or else it's bad news. Which I felt was definitely more likely. Bad news could come in a number of ways, but it was pretty unlikely that really, seriously bad news could come in the form of a note. A note, at least, delayed the worst of the news. I was glad that I'd thought that through. The note was going to be okay. I reached across and picked it up.

Not bad. Incomprehensible, but not dangerous. It wasn't bad news. Not yet. I turned the paper over.

Still not bad news, strictly speaking. Unsettling, yes. Unwelcome? Check. The kind of communication that made me wish I'd skipped the office and gone straight into lunch? Yeah, well. Maybe lunch didn't look so good anymore. My headache was coming back. Wearily I stooped down and plugged in the power cable for the computer, swapped phone jacks, and started up. Again, I decided to get a faster modem. What would you have done if you had the misfortune to be me? You would have ignored it. That would have been your response, right? You're lucky. You're not me.